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Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2008

Comparative and Foreign Law

Islamic Law

University of Pittsburgh School of Law

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Baghdad Booksellers, Basra Carpet Merchants, And The Law Of God And Man: Legal Pluralism And The Contemporary Muslim Experience, Haider Ala Hamoudi Jan 2008

Baghdad Booksellers, Basra Carpet Merchants, And The Law Of God And Man: Legal Pluralism And The Contemporary Muslim Experience, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

There is a crisis in our law schools in the study of Islamic law and the law of the Muslim polities. The current approaches either focus exclusively on national codes to the derogation of other vitally important influences on the legal order, most importantly the body of norms and rules derived from Islamic foundational texts known as the shari'a, or they regard as secondary, and at times irrelevant, the actual legal order of the societies in favor of an academic construction of the theories of medieval Muslim jurists. Neither of these approaches reflects with a necessary degree of accuracy the …


The Muezzin's Call And The Dow Jones Bell: On The Necessity Of Realism In The Study Of Islamic Law, Haider Ala Hamoudi Jan 2008

The Muezzin's Call And The Dow Jones Bell: On The Necessity Of Realism In The Study Of Islamic Law, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

The central flaw in the current approach to shari'a in the American legal academy is the reliance on the false assumption that contemporary Islamic rules are derived from classical doctrine. This has led both admirers and detractors of the manner in which shari'a is studied to focus their energies on obsolete medieval rules that bear no relationship to the manner in which modern Muslims approach shari'a. The reality is that given the structural pluralism of the rules of the classical era, there is no sensible way that modern rules could be derived from classical doctrine, either in letter or in …